Then the public mood suddenly changed. The catalyst was an image of one Syrian boy who died in the sea trying to reach Greece.

That a lone tragedy energised sympathy for refugees, when the deaths of many had not, seems odd, but this numbness to large-scale disaster is borne out by psychological research&colon; studies show we feel strongly and are more willing to donate for single identifiable victims.

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Why? Some scholars say it happens because we simply can’t feel compassion for large groups. As psychologist Paul Bloom puts it&colon; “It is impossible to empathise with 7 billion strangers, or to feel toward someone you’ve never met the degree of concern you feel for a child, a friend, or a lover.” Fellow US psychologist Paul Slovic also argues that “our capacity to feel sympathy for people in need is limited, leading to compassion fatigue, apathy and inaction”.

If empathy and compassion are fundamentally insensitive to large-scale problems, this seems to speak poorly for the usefulness of these moral emotions. But what if callousness to mass suffering represents a choice, and not a constraint beyond our control?

People actually predict they will feel more compassion as victim numbers increase. Yet this may in turn stoke up worries about the financial and emotional costs of trying to help many. Maybe this will be too expensive, ineffective given the scale, or too emotionally excruciating to think about.

For these reasons, people might try to suppress emotions such as sympathy to avoid these costs. Research in my laboratory backs this up. Volunteers saw images of either one or eight child refugees from the Darfur region of Sudan. Half were told to expect a request for a financial donation later. We found that the collapse of compassion from one to many victims reversed when this cost expectation was removed.

We may put emotional blinkers on consciously or instinctively. But if we realise we are tuning out mass suffering in our own self-interest, perhaps we can do something about it. There is a body of work in psychology and neuroscience that finds apparent limits of compassion and empathy can be overcome.

Presenting unsettling pictures of identifiable victims may not be the only way to inspire pro-social action in the face of large-scale crises. Instead, we can ask why people are failing to respond and target motivations for this. If they worry about emotional overload or the cost of intervention, then we can try to relieve those fears. My lab is pursuing ways to do this.

Although people often lack compassion for mass suffering, indifference is not inevitable.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Compassion’s wake-up call”